Every week when I was a kid, I would watch the late-night movie on Friday, usually quite tame horror films – spinoffs from Dracula and the original Frankenstein and usually nowhere near as frightening. Then one week the film was Psycho, completely unexpectedly and completely unlike the other films. I'd never seen a film as sophisticated as Psycho before, I'd never seen anything as real. I was 11 years old.

When Anthony Perkins starts slashing at the curtain, I think my entire body was frozen in petrification. It was searing images into my brain. Looking back on it, the degree of skill in that one shower scene was extraordinary and I became obsessed with the film as I grew up because nothing had ever affected me in that way. It was beautiful and scary at the same time.

It taught me a lot about both the art of film-making, in terms of how you put a movie together - the images, the music, the score, the design, the look of the picture, and it taught me about the danger of film-making, exposing people to images that they can't understand. I didn't sleep for weeks after I saw it – it really affected me.

I thought watching those horror films had exposed me to violence, but of course they didn't. Coming from a loving family, I wasn't used to violence at that level and so Psycho was extraordinary. It wasn't playing anymore – it was the real thing. I had an awakening about the power of cinema and the power of what it can do – for good and bad – and that's what Psycho did for me – it educated me overnight.

Producer Stephen Woolley's latest film, Made in Dagenham, co-produced with Elizabeth Karlsen, is in cinemas nationwide